Mix #123: Building an Arena

Looking at the success story of electronic music in the last decades it feels a bit like we have been building something big together. By “we” I mean all the people supporting this: Fans, ravers, DJs, producers, promoters and everyone else who has been involved.

From starting as a niche genre for freaks and nerds electronic music now attracts the masses and has transformed our culture in a significant way. We have taken electronic beats from the clubs to the arenas. This is a big achievement.

However, you don’t just build an arena just like that. A friend of mine recently made this clear to me: You can’t simply take the underground sound of the small clubs, keep repeating it and expect to attract millions. Every person resonates to a different type of sound and if you want a large number of people to resonate you have to tune the sounds accordingly.

This might sound like pure commercialization but that’s not quite what I mean. The ability to influence a large number of people can only be gained by allowing people to emotionally connect to the music, the crowd and the overall experience. This is what it’s really about – at least to me.

This gave me the idea for this mix: I wanted to find electronic sounds that would be appropriate for an arena while still showing some depth, sophistication and musical creativity.

The perfect examples for this are artists like James Egbert or The Glitch Mob and I also included them in this mix. Listen to the mix and hopefully you’ll know what I mean: